I like bacon, as do most people. It's one of the foods that everyone seems to relished in one form or another everywhere on earth. I even had some chinese bacon at a I suspect it's instinctive by now. Nobody has to convince a child that raspberries are edible...or crabapples, even when they are bitter, because we exhibit an instinctive desire to eat 'em and that would be a survival strategy worth reproducing...and one could easily see that the meat hung to dry near the smokey hearth's fire would sustain those who felt safe instinctively to eat it.

My dad, for whom I'm caregiver, has some pretty serious kidney problems and the salty stuff is a big no-no...so lately I've taken to make my own using de-boned pork shoulder. It turns out that almost all pork these days is already injected with some brine, so I slowly dry out a few slabs of this under the cover of my grill, without fire (or very little fire and only briefly) and with a smoldering aluminum foil sachet of wood chips burning for a few hours. It comes out beautiful and tasty (though a little bland by most american's hyper-salt-numbed tastes)...and sooo smokey. It's also leaner so I will typically cook it by frying it until crispy it in olive oil, and season it with coarse ground black pepper and garlic while frying...awesome. Of course, my version won't survive in the fridge for long without extra salt and other preservatives like nitrates and stuff...so I freeze mine and then when it's not too hard I pre-slice it and re-wrap with wax paper between the slices and keep it zip-locked in the freezer until needed until my old man's instinctive hunger for bacon will crave and require it. Sounds like a lot of work but it's one of the most pleasant chores that make the lives of our dependent parents more worthwhile and enjoyable.

And having been to Zingerman's many times I have to agree with their view...particularly if it tasted like their double smoked home-style peppered bacon. Truely the holy grail of bacons in my opinion.

Why do so many women think men "should be" just like women except for the penis? Really, why? Of course, we can ask why do men wonder why women aren't just like men except for (fill in the blank with the obvious salient difference). The bottom line is that men and women are only similar at best but since men and women each have a wide range of natural intelligences and behviors which at some extreme actually overlap, we see the pointlessness of using one perceptual standard as a ruler by which we measure the other in anything like a definitive way.

Never the less, we are endlessly fascinated by asking the question but if we really want to understand humans you really only have to watch monkeys a lot.

I agree with the basic premis of your argument; that we must stop ant-science conservatives from informing policy, but should we not also stop anti-science liberals from doing the same thing?

Really...for one thing we'd stop hearing the koan of "the debate is over" which is definitely NOT science. We'd see research targetted towards trying to falsify theories, which the IPCC has all but specifically eliminated from its charter, which doesn't seem very scientific to me. Oh, and we'd stop hearing the reasoning that says "well we need to do what the IPCC says because if we're wrong it would destroy the planet" which sounds like the religious reasoning that says things like "surely Islam must be right because so many people believe in it and besides if you're wrong you'll go to hell>' See, that's more like religion than science.

And there are lots of other aspects of the alarm being risen' over the process of global climate change which we've lately become so obsessed over that could use a healthy injection of objective reality. Our climate, like all aspects of our human impacted environment certainly calls for a lot more research and certainly we should reign-in the truely damaging pollution we create (and I wouldn't include CO2 in that class) and let's face it, even if we could controll our climate by controlling CO2, we'd still face genuinely serious threats from mega-catastrophes all of which are exacerbated by our poorly designed human infrastructure and the continued degradation of our natural environment.

So, yeah...lets get that old time religion out of our scientific processes and lets remember that stupid thinking is not a domain only inhabited by conservatives and the best way to identify and reject bad decisions is to look at your fellows and neighbors and take an honest look at yourself while you're at it.

When the monkeys see and hear another monkey get highly agitated and vocal about other monkeys doing anything sexual, all the other monkeys are inexorably compelled to watch and pay attention to every detail they can get...which, in the case of humans and their modern media equates to "profit from advertisers".

It also pays to portray whatever sexual behavior is being used to direct our attention in the most sordid way with every detail illuniated to magnify the presumed significance of it...and then another sex scandal comes along of a different variety and the monkey forget all about the previous excitement and are already aniticipating the next one.

Right here in the beginning of your essay "Federal ethanol mandates have contributed to record corn prices, which in turn make it almost impossible to turn a profit selling ethanol."

The operative words being "federal" and "mandate". Anyone who sees these two words in proximity to one another and thinks that equates to "surely it must be a good idea" should reconsider and take a time out to read a few books on how good governance comes about.